Recent Posts

The Boulder TechStars program is in week three and the
intensity level is high. The TechStars office is across the hall
from ours at Foundry Group and it’s wild to see the level of
activity ramp up during the three months that TechStars Boulder
is in session.

I’m trying a new thing this program and doing a weekly CEO-only
meeting. I’ve been trying to figure out a new way to engage with
each program other than mentoring a team or two, and have been
looking for a high leverage activity that I could do remotely for
all of the other programs. My current experiment is an hour a
week with all of the CEOs in a completely confidential meeting,
but a peer meeting so each of them gets to talk about what they
are struggling with to help solve each other’s problems as well
as learn from each other.

We’ve done two of these meetings in Boulder and I love it so far.
I’ll run this experiment for the whole program, learn from it,
and iterate. If it works, I’ll scale it across all the programs.

Yesterday I also finished up my first set of 1:1 meetings with
all of the teams. In my 1:1 meetings, I try to keep them very
short – 15 minutes – and focus on what is “top of mind“. I learn more from this and can
help more precisely than if I spent 30 minutes getting a generic
pitch, which will likely change dramatically anyway through the
course of TechStars. So each of these top of mind drills is “up
to 5 minutes telling me about your company” and “10 minutes
talking about whatever is top of mind.”

By the third week, I notice what I call “pitch fatigue” setting
in. I think every entrepreneur should have several short pitches
that they can give anytime, in any context, on demand.

Bt week three, the teams are still fighting through getting the
15 second and 60 second pitch nailed. That’s fine, but there’s
emotional exhaustion in even trying for some of them. The
founders have said some set of words so many times that they are
tired. The emotion of what they are doing is out of the pitch.
Their enthusiasm is muted – not for the business, but for
describing it.

Recently I was on the receiving end of a description from an
entrepreneur, who has a great idea that I love, that had the
emotional impact a TSA inspection at the airport. He was going
through the motions with almost zero emotional content. At the
end of it, I said one sentence - ”Don’t get sick of
telling your story.” I then went deeper on what I meant.

He responded by email later that day:

Thanks for articulating what was going on in my head. I think
I was getting burnt out from telling the same story to so many
mentors. I need to stay focused and stick with the story that
worked well the first 40 meetings. I also need to be careful that
the lack of “freshness” doesn’t affect how passionate and
energetic I come across. Timing for this realization couldn’t be
better given our upcoming fundraising trip.

I’ve done an enormous amount of pitching and fundraising over the
years. When we raised our first Foundry Group fund in 2007, I did
90 meetings in three months before we got our first investor
commitment. By meeting 87, after hearing no a lot (we got about
30 no’s out of the first 90 meetings before we got a yes) I was
definitely had pitch fatigue. But every time I told it, I brought
the same level of intensity, emotion, optimism, and belief that I
did the first time I told it. Today, six years later, when I
describe what we are doing and why we are doing it, and why you
should care, I’m just as focused on getting the message across as
I ever have been. And I never get tired of telling our story.